It seems so far that this does enable China to further catch up and massively expand the use of the captured technology, but are there instances of them qualitatively surpassing it?
I'm sure China has enough resources for advancements beyond replication, as much as it's capable of showcasing something to the rest of the world equally valuable of "transfer".
They started at the bottom rung of the quality chain. They are constantly climbing it up but the speed seems slow. Then suddenly they are in par or little ahead.
Chinese are already within a spitting distance in most technologies. Semiconductors have some technology bottlenecks like EUV machines that are hard to replicate. Chinese firms are already in a position where they don't need joint ventures. They hire directly senior engineers from South Korean and Taiwanese firms to work for them.
They send their businessmen into trips trough Europe and the US with cameras hanging in their necks taking pictures of the factories and taking notes. When their hosts waited orders from Japan, they build factories and started competing.
Industrial Revolution in the US started with stealing. Samuel Slater – "Father of the American Industrial Revolution" ("Slater the Traitor" in the UK) didn't invent anything. He just memorized and copied British cotton spinning mill designs, especially the water frame and moved to America.
> He learned of the American interest in developing similar machines, and he was also aware of British law against exporting the designs. He therefore memorized as much as he could and departed for New York in 1789. Some people of Belper called him "Slater the Traitor", as they considered his move a betrayal of the town where many earned their living at Strutt's mills.[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater#American_factori...
It's only a matter of time until they work their way up the chain.
Remember the Tim Cook quote how it's difficult to fill a room with machinists in US, while in China you can fill 3 football fields with them.
Skills follow activity, they do not lead activity. You learn by doing.
If you want to develop good bridge building skills, then build a lot of bridges. As a result of that process, you will, after a delay, have a labor pool that knows how to do it well, and the bridges you build later on will be higher quality than the bridges you started out building.
You do not wait for the labor pool to sprout up like mushrooms spontaneously from the ground, so there are all these bridge builders standing around with nothing to do, and then you decide that you'll have them fill up a few rooms and and hire some of them to build a bridge.
Getting parts CNCed in China may be 10x less than the cost in the US, and materials are a tenth the cost as well (in small qty) as they haven't been transported yet. You can get roughly the same throughput in the US if you want to pay for it, but it will be vastly more expensive.
That is just logically false. It's not even a question of measurement, it is false by definition. The income paid to produce is by definition always sufficient to purchase the output that has been produced. But remember that income paid to the factors of production includes both labor and capital income, because both the owners of capital and the suppliers of labor purchase the products that are created by the combining of labor and capital to produce output.
What is unsustainable is running persistent trade deficits overseas. E.g. by allowing foreign capital inflows, we have allowed the foreign sector to distort prices in an unsustainable manner.
Take what I said with some restrictions, like "US workers can't afford skilled or semiskilled US labor" which is afaict true. I work in production automation, life sciences, and software; my hobby projects in these area are unfortunately quite expensive due to US labor costs. As much as possible I must avoid using US labor if I want to get anything done.
Nicely put. Thanks for pointing that out. That really resonates for me as I think about my career and skillset. I'm where I am now because of building things with somewhat inferior skills (risky) at the start and growing my skills . I need to repeat that with new tools/processes now. It all seems obvious looking back.
...Perhaps another skill is having the foresight to see what will be needed in the next phase. I did it then, hopefully I'll be able to do it again. A bit like running a small company of one person. Where is the next investment made?
China - the populace - seem to be pretty good at this.
Eventually something has got to give in this country. Soon nothing will be left but a hollow husk.
Could robotics and aggressive automation of production lines make this shift? ...Or is it in fact more complex than it seems and the lead times for setting up these kinds of businesses too large to have a useful effect in the short/medium term?
I remember right around 2000 George Will bloviated about how Russia was a third world nation by economy size, why do we treat them with such deference.
Psst George: They still have a LOT of nukes.
That might be us. A shell of a country with a failing economy, strong military, and huge number of nukes.
Of course right around then global warming might really start taking off and a billion or two people are starving and become refugees. Then we see what happened in the EU and Syria, but worldwide and 100x worse.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_Sta...